Glam Media, one of the newfangled content and advertising networks assumed by many industry observers to be vulnerable to financial meltdown, says it still hasn’t seen any marked decline in online display advertising. Yet, to be cautious, it is slashing salaries by moving to a system called “variable pay.”

While it’s too early to say whether the much-hyped company will remain healthy in coming months, the media company — which focuses predominantly on the female demographic — is reporting it had its strongest revenue quarter of on record, and also that it has decided for now not to lay people off. The news was contained in a Glam memo released to employees today, a copy of which was leaked to VentureBeat. VentureBeat has confirmed its veracity.

The company made some small trims to its workforce several months ago, but that was before the stock market crashed in October, which many economists now believe marked the beginning of a prolonged recession.

Instead of doing mass layoffs, as many other Silicon Valley start-ups have, Glam is implementing an across-the-board cut in fixed pay, and instead increase the amount of “variable pay” its employees get — in other words, pegging more of their compensation on revenue performance.

The management team of 12, for example, which took a temporary 25 percent pay cut earlier this year, will during the next year take a 25 to 60 percent pay cut in its compensation, depending on their exact position. Glam’s top sales representatives, for example, will now only have about 25 percent of their compensation “fixed,” down from 75 percent “fixed.” That means they’re more dependent on Glam bringing in revenue than ever before.

The rest of the company is also taking higher variable components of their pay. Functional managers will see 15 percent of their pay move to variable, and other employees will see between 3 and 10 percent of their pay become variable. The less an employee makes, the less their pay is variable.

This is a notable experiment. Most companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere reward their sales executives with such a variable pay component, because sales people should be entirely focused on sales and nothing else. It is unusual for companies to make rank and file subject to revenue performance, however, in part because of the danger that short-term goals will be strived for at the expense of long-term decisions (quality product development may be neglected, for example, because there’s no reward for it).

Excerpt of the memo is below. Full copy here (downloads doc).

Social networking for women got a boost yesterday as media conglomerate Meredith Corp. acquired an undisclosed minority stake in Real Girls Media Network. The San Francisco-based network encompasses about 30 sites and portals for women — notably, DivineCaroline, a largely user-generated advice page.

In addition to bringing Real Girls’ 3 million unique viewers to Meredith’s properties each month (upping its total to 15 million), the deal will combine the two companies’ advertising inventories and sales forces. This should jumpstart revenue on both sides. Also, Meredith will now have access to Real Girls technology that could update the look and feel of its other sites, hopefully attracting more traffic. The large public company had an online presence before, but the partnership will automatically land it in the top five women’s networks, according to ComScore.

Even so, it’s got quite a fight ahead considering its formidable competition. The woman-targeted Glam Network alone drew 52 million unique visitors in September and continues to steam ahead (recently introducing a new advertising application service). The other heavy hitters, iVillage and AOL Living, bring in about 20 and 15 million a month respectively. But NBC-backed iVillage struck a lucrative deal with BlogHer in July, adding over 2,000 blogs to its network. It’s questionable whether there’s enough room for another major player in this space.

Meredith’s forte still lies in publishing, boasting magazine titles like Better Homes and Gardens, Parents and Family Circle. But it’s diversifying into television and the web quickly, making about $1.6 billion this year. By contrast, Real Girls is still relatively young. It raised $6 million from the 3i Group and Walden Ventures in 2006 after its inception.

Glam Media, a company targeting content and ads mainly at women, is letting advertisers launch full-fledged widgets and applications on the Glam site.

Just like Facebook lets developers create applications that run freely on its site, Glam is doing the same for advertisers. The main difference is that these advertisers get to have their display ads run front-and-center throughout their applications or widgets. The apps they create are designed to be integrated into the blogs and other publishing sites in Glam’s network.

The product ensures that advertisers can “own” their space, something that they have a difficult time doing on Facebook, for example. On Facebook and other social networks, one advertiser may promote a film in one area of an application or widget while a different advertiser promotes a competing film in another area. There’s no way to track such conflicts. Glam offers analytics to monitor how advertisements perform, and ways to avoid these clashes.

Take a look at the Sex and the City example in the screenshot below.

The move continues Glam’s steady release of innovative ways for advertisers to interact with viewers — even at a time when the economic slowdown will likely stunt online ad growth, and in turn wallop Glam’s business model.

There’s no doubt Glam has carved out significant reach — it recently emerged as a top-ten web property, according to ComScore Media Metrix. However, that reach includes Glam ads on sites that aren’t necessarily owned by the company. So while Glam is warming up to big ad agencies by providing them the sort of products they love, the big question is whether those agencies will fully embrace the publishing inventory Glam offers them.

The trick for Glam is to make sure it owns enough good content. But that’s expensive. Now that Glam will be forced to horde much of its vast amount of funding in order to survive the downturn, its ability to acquire good content will be slowed. It has struck partnerships with publishers, but even those could come under pressure.

While Glam continues to copy Facebook with things like its application platform, it also wants to distance itself from the social networking giant — insisting that Facebook has been relegated to a “social media” site where most ads come from “remnant” ad networks that serve very cheap ads. Glam’s network requires IAB standard ad units.

Glam’s latest product, called the “Glam Applications Network,” launches with the support of 50 companies producing widgets and applications for the platform — including Sphere, BuzzFeed, Meebo, PollDaddy, PicApp, JS-Kit and Kwanzoo. Many of these companies build widgets for things like polls, slideshows, video commenting and contests, and they will allow advertisers to offer display ads inside the widgets.

Glam also offers a standardized payment system for developers, publishers and media companies.

The apps and widgets will be available in the Glam Apps Store.

The product is available for Glam’s 700-plus websites in the Glam.com and Brash.com (Glam’s new offering for men) networks — and will be opened to everyone in early 2009.

Glam also offers rights management. So for example, if VentureBeat wanted to offer a widget of its full news stories to the New York Times, we could do so using one widget. VentureBeat could then use a second widget to offer its news content in a different way (perhaps just the first two paragraphs) to three or four other top publishers. And using a third widget, we could offer just our headlines to any other site.

The Glam platform is built on standards OpenSocial and OpenID, which are likely to make it easier for advertisers to interact with users across widgets on Glam (through a common OpenID login and registration for users) and also across the web (because applications will be compatible with other social networks via OpenSocial).

Glam, a women’s site publisher and ad network, is becoming more like most other ad networks out there. It will further delay payments that it owes to partner publishers, starting this month.

Publishers typically have to wait awhile for ad payments, whether in old media formats like print, or new media formats like online ad networks. First, an ad will run with a publisher, then the advertiser gets the bill, then they pay the agency they worked with to place the ad, then — in the case of ad networks — the network gets a check from the agency, then finally the publisher who ran the ad gets paid. Everyone tries to hang on to the money a little longer than they need to, in order to earn more interest by keeping it in their bank accounts.

As the economy gets worse and ad revenue growth continues to fall off, this practice is a way for Glam and everyone else along the ad supply chain to shore up their finances.

Glam had been differentiating itself, in part, by paying publishers on a faster schedule. Now, it’s joining other ad networks, like Federated Media (which VentureBeat uses), that have seen payments delayed to them lately, and are delaying payments to publishers as a result.

Starting next month, Glam will implement the following payment schedules with publishers, depending on its contractual obligations with them (Glam email to publishers via TechCrunch):

Dear Publisher,

Please be advised that to better prepare for the current financial situation, Glam anticipates a significant slow down in collection payments from advertisers. Therefore we will need to align the expected timing of payments from advertisers with the payments we make to our publishers. Accordingly, as of November 1, 2008 the revenue payments will now be scheduled on 120 day payment terms. However, in order to help minimize the impact to you and avoid gaps in payments, you will be paid as follows:

For publishers with 60 day payment terms:

Dear Publisher,

Please be advised that to better prepare for the current financial situation, Glam anticipates a significant slow down in collection payments from advertisers. Therefore we will need to align the expected timing of payments from advertisers with the payments we make to our publishers. Accordingly, as of November 1, 2008 the revenue payments will now be scheduled on 120 day payment terms. However, in order to help minimize the impact to you and avoid gaps in payments, you will be paid as follows:

November Revenue: 50% will be paid in January and 50% will be paid in February
December Revenue: 50% will be paid in March and 50% will be paid in April
January Revenue: 100% will be paid in May

Note: There are no changes in the amount you will earn or receive with this payment revision.

We appreciate your cooperation and we will do everything we can to make the transition to the new payment schedule as smooth as possible.

This agreement will go into effect November 1, 2008.

For publishers with 90 day payment terms:

Dear Publisher,

Please be advised that to better prepare for the current financial situation, Glam anticipates a significant slow down in collection payments from advertisers. Therefore we will need to align the expected timing of payments from advertisers with the payments we make to our publishers. Accordingly, as of November 1, 2008 the revenue payments will now be scheduled on 120 day payment terms. However, in order to help minimize the impact to you and avoid gaps in payments, you will be paid as follows:

November Revenue: 50% will be paid in February and 50% will be paid in March
December Revenue: 100 will be paid in April
January Revenue: 100% will be paid in May

Note: There are no changes in the amount you will earn or receive with this payment revision.

We appreciate your cooperation and we will do everything we can to make the transition to the new payment schedule as smooth as possible.

This agreement will go into effect November 1, 2008.

Glam Media, a content and ad network focused mostly on woman, is apparently about to launch a network focused on men called Brash.com, something we’d expected after reporting on it last month after early rumors.

The site has a message saying “coming soon” (see left). The effort comes at a time when analysts and investors are watching the online ad industry closely, to see if it will remain resilient even as the economy takes a beating, or whether it will decline and wreck havoc on hundreds if not thousands of online publishers that have become dependent on the advertising for their livelihood.

Of all companies betting on a robust ad economy, Glam and its investors are making one of the biggest. In February, the company raised $84.6 million in a deal that valued Glam at a half billion dollars, from a large German publishing company Burda and several Silicon Valley companies. Glam continues to roll out new channels and properties. It recently launched a Luxury channel, a gutsy move considering most consumers are likely to be tightening their belts right now. Signing up enough advertisers to keep these properties afloat is now Glam’s big challenge.

The world is divided into two camps, one sanguine and one pessimistic. Most experts and analysts still belong to the first one. This camp say online advertising will continue to grow, because more readers are still moving online and because online offers advertisers an easier way to track the return on investment. This camp says growth will be in the low single digits a year, instead of double digits they’d predicted before the sharp drop in the market occured earlier this month. However, even in this camp, most people say search advertising is likely to be the stronger category because of its superior accountability. Glam relies on display advertising. Most people say display will have to develop tracking and targeting tools before it can remain robust, and that’s something Glam says it is working hard to do — for example, allowing advertisers to target on things like time of day the user is online, gender, and category of interest.

Glam Media, the fast-growing content and ad network focused on women, has launched Glam Luxury — featuring things like high-end fashion, premium travel and fine living. It will target luxury advertisers, including Swarovski.

What great timing! A luxury site? Right when the economy is falling off the cliff? When when hundreds of thousands, including wealthy bankers, are being thrown out of work?

It fits the company’s recent bold history. Glam has been expanding at break-neck speed, launching all sorts of content channels, in a race to lay claim to largest network devoted to woman, and recently, men. It has raised money — at a lofty value of half a billion dollars — to maintain its momentum, and the risk is that the company’s model could crumble if the economy slows. If advertising dries up, Glam is especially vulnerable because the company is essentially an advertising distributor to partner sites that join it (though it does continue to launch and buy some of its own content sites).

In the case of the Glam Luxury channel, more than 35 online publishers have joined in — including some Glam-owned publications like BlackBook.com, Luxique, Momist, Senora Cartera and Travels in Taste.

Glam’s executives say that, actually, in adverse times such as this advertisers continue to target “influential high-end consumers.” The “middle” market gets hit the hardest, they say, because of flight by the masses to “value” goods. The luxury market gets hit too, but not as badly. Many wealthy individuals downscale to buy goods at a level below luxury, known as “premium” (people buying a hybrid car for $30,000, for example would fit into this category). With its channel, Glam is going after both luxury and premium. The company’s executives point to the success of Neiman Marcus during the last downturn in 2001 as evidence the segment can do well.

Second, Glam execs say they believe the Internet will continue to do well relative to offline markets, because the Internet is “a smart medium.” Affluent customers spend 10 hours a week online at home, and three times more time online than reading magazines, according to a Luxury Institute study cited by Glam. Finally, the internet also allows better targeting for advertisers, Glam and other Internet retailers argue.

Glam Media’s network now features eight separate channels: Style (Fashion, Beauty, Shopping); Living (Food & Wine, Home & Design, Travel & Leisure); Entertainment; Wellness; Health; Family, Black Life and Luxury.

The company says its network now has 640 sites.

Glam Media, the fast-growing content and ad network focused on women, has launched Glam Luxury — featuring things like high-end fashion, premium travel and fine living. It will target luxury advertisers, including Swarovski.

What great timing! A luxury site? Right when the economy is falling off the cliff? When when hundreds of thousands, including wealthy bankers, are being thrown out of work?

It fits the company’s recent bold history. Glam has been expanding at break-neck speed, launching all sorts of content channels, in a race to lay claim to largest network devoted to woman, and recently, men. It has raised money — at a lofty value of half a billion dollars — to maintain its momentum, and the risk is that the company’s model could crumble if the economy slows. If advertising dries up, Glam is especially vulnerable because the company is essentially an advertising distributor to partner sites that join it (though it does continue to launch and buy some of its own content sites).

In the case of the Glam Luxury channel, more than 35 online publishers have joined in — including some Glam-owned publications like BlackBook.com, Luxique, Momist, Senora Cartera and Travels in Taste.

Glam’s executives say that, actually, in adverse times such as this advertisers continue to target “influential high-end consumers.” The “middle” market gets hit the hardest, they say, because of flight by the masses to “value” goods. The luxury market gets hit too, but not as badly. Many wealthy individuals downscale to buy goods at a level below luxury, known as “premium” (people buying a hybrid car for $30,000, for example would fit into this category). With its channel, Glam is going after both luxury and premium. The company’s executives point to the success of Neiman Marcus during the last downturn in 2001 as evidence the segment can do well.

Second, Glam execs say they believe the Internet will continue to do well relative to offline markets, because the Internet is “a smart medium.” Affluent customers spend 10 hours a week online at home, and three times more time online than reading magazines, according to a Luxury Institute study cited by Glam. Finally, the internet also allows better targeting for advertisers, Glam and other Internet retailers argue.

Glam Media’s network now features eight separate channels: Style (Fashion, Beauty, Shopping); Living (Food & Wine, Home & Design, Travel & Leisure); Entertainment; Wellness; Health; Family, Black Life and Luxury.

The company says its network now has 640 sites.

Glam Media, the fast-growing content and ad network focused on women, has launched Glam Luxury — featuring things like high-end fashion, premium travel and fine living. It will target luxury advertisers, including Swarovski.

What great timing! A luxury site? Right when the economy is falling off the cliff? When when hundreds of thousands, including wealthy bankers, are being thrown out of work?

It fits the company’s recent bold history. Glam has been expanding at break-neck speed, launching all sorts of content channels, in a race to lay claim to largest network devoted to woman, and recently, men. It has raised money — at a lofty value of half a billion dollars — to maintain its momentum, and the risk is that the company’s model could crumble if the economy slows. If advertising dries up, Glam is especially vulnerable because the company is essentially an advertising distributor to partner sites that join it (though it does continue to launch and buy some of its own content sites).

In the case of the Glam Luxury channel, more than 35 online publishers have joined in — including some Glam-owned publications like BlackBook.com, Luxique, Momist, Senora Cartera and Travels in Taste.

Glam’s executives say that, actually, in adverse times such as this advertisers continue to target “influential high-end consumers.” The “middle” market gets hit the hardest, they say, because of flight by the masses to “value” goods. The luxury market gets hit too, but not as badly. Many wealthy individuals downscale to buy goods at a level below luxury, known as “premium” (people buying a hybrid car for $30,000, for example would fit into this category). With its channel, Glam is going after both luxury and premium. The company’s executives point to the success of Neiman Marcus during the last downturn in 2001 as evidence the segment can do well.

Second, Glam execs say they believe the Internet will continue to do well relative to offline markets, because the Internet is “a smart medium.” Affluent customers spend 10 hours a week online at home, and three times more time online than reading magazines, according to a Luxury Institute study cited by Glam. Finally, the internet also allows better targeting for advertisers, Glam and other Internet retailers argue.

Glam Media’s network now features eight separate channels: Style (Fashion, Beauty, Shopping); Living (Food & Wine, Home & Design, Travel & Leisure); Entertainment; Wellness; Health; Family, Black Life and Luxury.

The company says its network now has 640 sites.

Here’s the latest action:

In Buffet we trust — Billionaire Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathway group is investing $3 billion in General Electric. Why the investment? GE is the “symbol of American business to the world,” Buffet told VCCircle. That’s the spirit in a troubled economy — or is it bottom-feeding?

New data on M&As and IPOs — Mergers and acquisitions activity and initial public offerings of venture-backed companies are on pace for the lowest levels this decade, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource. This seems in line with what we said earlier about the IPO market being the worst it’s been in 30+ years.

Mac laptops continue to gain share — Portable computers made by Apple accounted for some 20 percent of retail notebook sales during July and August in the U.S., according to data from NPD. With new ones likely due soon (more on that at the bottom of this post), expect this growth to continue. Register Hardware has more.

Nintendo’s rumored Wii follow-up — The video game maker is said to be working on the follow up to its massively successful Wii console. It’s set to hit the market by 2011, according to the blog What They Play. Nintendo just outlined the new DS portable gaming system as well.

Acquia launches enterprise-class support for Drupal — The company that is behind the open-source Web content management system (CMS) appear to be making it slightly less open source for this particular version, according to CNET’s The Open Road.

Microsoft still trying to pay users to search — SearchPerks gives users points for each search performed on Live search. You can redeem these points for stuff. I guess it’s better than straight up paying people, but it’s still awfully pathetic. Make that best product Microsoft, that’s how you win, not by paying users. The Inquisitr has more.

GameStop buys Micromania for $700M — The video game retailing giant is buying the French gaming chain to bolster its brand in the region. Gamespot has more.

Glam teams up with GumGum — The two can now offer free legal images across Glam Media’s publishing network, according to TechCrunch. Glam + GumGum? Golly gee that’s great.

Blizzard beats the bots with a lawyer combo — The World of Warcraft creator is successful will get $6 million from the makers of a software bot, which automates many parts of the online fantasy game. The BBC has more.

EA kills Tiberium — The squad shooter based in the Command & Conquer universe was originally delayed until 2010. Now, it’s a goner. Kotaku has more.

Jaxtr gets premium memberships — Best international call rates, priority customer service, personalized contact pages, global online voicemail and the ability to forward voicemails to email are all part of the package for the company that links your phone to the web.

More fake MacBook Pro photos? – The event for the launch the new laptops is rumored to be coming up in less than two weeks. Could the picture below really be what they look like? Probably not, but it’s much better than the first attempt. Cult of Mac also has a rumored promo shot.

updated
Glam, the content and advertising network focused on women, is launching a German site called Glam Deutschland, after acquiring a large German content network called Codex Media.

Techcrunch reported on the Codex deal, after getting a tip about it today. We’ve confirmed the Codex deal with company sources. In fact, the much of the Codex deal was already announced in July, as was the intent for a joint venture with Burda, the large German publisher.

We reported yesterday that Glam continues to expand in Germany and elsewhere, and that Glam is also about to launch a new channel focused on men, internally called CodeBlue.

Like Glam, the German site Codex serves women across a variety of “luxury” markets, including fashion. It owns Cosmopolitan Germany and Elle Germany. All employees of Codex will be a part of Glam’s Germany unity, Glam DE, led by former DoubleClick VP Ralf Hirt. That unit will report into Glam International. Glam has opened offices in Munich, Berlin and about to open in Dusseldorf, according to company sources.

Ralf Hirt, formerly VP, International for DoubleClick, now Google, joined Glam as i serving as GM Glam Germany.

Glam is about to launch in France and in Japan, and is looking at several other acquisitions.

Glam is apparently moving resources away from the U.S. (see story yesterday about workforce cuts here), and shifting resources to new markets.